Box Office: Dystopian Times for Dystopian Movies?

Is it dystopian times for our teenaged dystopian movies? Meaning a utopia for critics?

“The Hunger Games” ended last fall with a whimper, grossing 68% of what the first one did, while “The Maze Runner” never really caught on ($80-$100 mil). As for “The Divergent Series”? It had hopes to be another “Hunger Games” but now it's cratering toward “Maze.”

This weekend, “Divergent: Allegiant” opened at $29 million, which is almost half of what the original opened to in 2014:

YEAR

MOVIE

US GROSS

OPENING

2014

Divergent

$150,947,895

$54,607,747

2015

The Divergent Series: Insurgent

$130,179,072

$52,263,680

2016

The Divergent Series: Allegiant

$29,050,000

$29,050,000

The original wound up grossing 2.75 x its opening, the sequel 2.5 times. If this one does that, that's only $72.5 million, or half of what the original grossed. If it does 3 x its opening, it'll still be around $87. And there's one more sequel to go. Jane, stop this crazy thing.

“Divergent”'s loss is “Zootopia”'s gain. For the third weekend in a row, it took top prize, with $38 mil, bringing its total thus far to $201. Abroad, it's added another $389.

In third place? One of those springtime (read: Easterish) Christian movies, “Miracles from Heaven,” starring a former star (Jennifer Garner). Trailer here. I hadn't heard of it until this week, but then I'm not in its demographic. Key words from the trailer: “faith” and “From the producers of 'Heaven Is For Real.'” On the one hand, it didn't open great: $15 mil. On the other hand, that's the 7th-best opening for quote-unquote “Christian” movies, meaning cultre-war Christian movies. And if you remove the big boys (“Passion” and the “Narnia” series), it's actually third, behind only “Son of God” ($25) and “Heaven Is For Real” ($22).

Anomaly of the weekend: “The Bronze,” opening in 1,167 theaters, had one of the worst per-theater-average openings ever: $361 per. To be precise, it's the seventh-worst ever for movies opening in more than 1,000 theaters.